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Tourist Studies
2014, Vol. 14(1) 30 –47
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1468797613511684
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Music on the edge: Busking
at the Cliffs of Moher and the
commodification of a musical
landscape
Adam Kaul
Augustana College, USA
Abstract
The Cliffs of Moher is one of the most popular tourist sites in all of Ireland, and buskers have
been playing traditional music there for generations. The site and traditional music have each
become powerful metonyms for Irish identity. In this article, I explore the complex and changing
relationship between Irish identity, music, and tourism at the cliffs. In particular, I analyze recent
conflicts that have erupted between musicians and the local tourism authorities which opened a
€32 million award-winning interpretive center there in 2007.
Keywords
busking, commodification, governmentality, identity, traditional Irish music, tourism
Introduction
The Cliffs of Moher is a stunningly beautiful, elemental landscape of sea, stone, and sky.
The Cliffs, located in County Clare in the West of Ireland, extend 8 km from the village of
Doolin in the north, rising to a height of 214 m before descending again to sea-level in the
fishing village of Liscannor on its southern edge. It is probably no wonder that people have
been traveling there for centuries, long before there was anything we might call a “tourist
industry.” As early as 1835, the regional landlord, Cornellius O’Brien, built a tower at the
Cliffs’ highest point to accommodate all of the visitors. As tourism expanded and democ-
ratized in the latter half of the twentieth century, the site became a prominent waypoint on
tourist routes. By the 1980s and 1990s when true “mass tourism” took off, throngs of
Corresponding author:
Adam Kaul, Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Welfare, Augustana College, 639 38th Street,
Rock Island, IL 61201, USA.
Email: adamkaul@augustana.edu
511684TOU14110.1177/1468797613511684Tourist StudiesKaul
research-article2013
Article
Kaul 31
visitors flocked to the Cliffs, crystallizing the site’s reputation as one of the country’s most
premiere tourist destinations. Local villages like Liscannor, Lahinch, and Doolin benefited
greatly from this expanding tourist trade, and for nearby communities like Doolin, where I
have spent the last decade conducting ethnographic research, tourism has all but supplanted
the traditional farming and fishing economies. Indeed, according to the director of the site,
recent estimates indicate that close to a million tourists visit the Cliffs annually, although
visitor numbers dipped during the worst years of the global recession.
Traditional Irish musicians have been busking for tips from tourists at the Cliffs of
Moher for generations. Some of the current musicians have been playing at the site regu-
larly for 20 years or more. But in late 2006, just over a month before the grand opening
of a lavish new interpretive center there, it was announced that the local circuit court
granted an order preventing unlicensed busking and commercial trading. Instead, it was
announced that a new licensing scheme would allow a smaller number of buskers to play
at the site, but under strict new regulations (Deegan, 2007a: 2). As reported in the national
newspaper, The Irish Times (“Cliff Buskers May Face Audition,” 2006), at one point, the
County Council suggested that they would hold auditions to vet musicians. Although this
did not end up taking place, it was never made clear just how the county bureaucrats
were going to assess the quality of the players’ musicianship. While it was within the
County Council’s legal right to do so, the musicians and the public objected vociferously
to these moves, deeply offended that access to the site, which had been open to public
right-of-way for generations, was now going to be restricted. The public outcry on behalf
of the musicians was widespread. At best, musicians’ activities would be severely regu-
lated under the new rules; at worst, they might be barred from the site altogether. The
conflict between buskers and the developers of the new center quickly spun out of con-
trol. In fact, the announcement about the court injunction and the licensing scheme in late
2006 was really just the culmination of a conflict between the new tourism venture and
musicians that had been brewing for quite some time. The Cliffs of Moher Centre, Ltd,
which is a subsidiary company set up by the local government authority, the Clare County
Council, had been seeking such an injunction for nearly 2 years against buskers and other
commercial traders selling souvenirs and crafts (Deegan, 2005: 2). During that time,
several musicians who regularly played music at the site were even handed trespass
notices and asked to vacate the premises. Some complied, but others called the Council’s
bluff and simply played on. One local resident who knows several of the buskers told me,
The buskers—to their credit—I mean, I’m so pleased they did this—it was only maybe three or
four of them, they just said, “No, we’re not moving. We’re going to carry on.” They were
treated appallingly.
Meanwhile, a letter signed by dozens of famous Irish musicians including Mary Black,
Luka Bloom, Donal Lunny, Christy Moore, and others was sent to the Clare County
Council pleading with them to open a dialogue with the buskers. A highly charged narra-
tive quickly took hold that placed local musicians in stark opposition to the economic
interests of the tourism industry. Accusations and counter-accusations were made, some
through the press and some privately. Local and national media outlets fanned the flames
with dramatic headlines, and the conflict quickly entered into the public discourse.
32 Tourist Studies 14(1)
For me, a number of questions emerge about this situation. What exactly led to the
conflict in the first place, and how did it so quickly become part of the national conversa-
tion? What is the proper balance between music-making and money-making? And what
can this case tell us about the ways in which tourism enterprises have come to increas-
ingly manage the activities of people who work at tourist sites? While very real disagree-
ments exist between buskers and the managers who run the interpretive center, I suggest
that there is an underlying identity crisis that is fueling the public discourse. Both tradi-
tional Irish music and the Cliffs of Moher have emerged as symbolic markers of Irish
identity, and in an atmosphere of tighter regulations, overdevelopment of tourism ven-
tures, and a severe economic recession in Ireland since the recent crash of the economy,
the conflict between the music and tourism at the Cliffs of Moher touched a raw nerve.
In the following article, I utilize several intersecting frames of analysis to explain the
multifaceted tensions that manifested at the nexus between tourism and music at the
Cliffs. First, a political economy approach to the neoliberal commodification of the site
and various actors’ activities there is warranted. In that regard, Foucault’s notion of “gov-
ernmentality” is useful (Foucault, 1997). Second, the site’s importance as a national sym-
bol (Healy et al., 2012: 11) and the similarly heady significance of music’s place as a
marker of Irish identity (Kaul, 2007, 2009) naturally lend itself to an analysis of chang-
ing notions of Irishness in a post-Celtic Tiger, post-crash era. At the core of this case
study is an analysis of the inherent tension between commerce and culture. Finally, since
there is a paucity of ethnographic accounts of street performers at tourist sites,1 I also
hope that this article can fill in a gap in the literature.
The commodification of an Irish landscape
The ownership of the property where the new interpretive center is situated is compli-
cated. Originally, 35 separate farming families owned various sections of the Cliffs, but
significantly, there has always been a public right-of-way along the cliff edge as well. In
the 1970s, as tourism began to intensify, a regional tourism body called Shannon
Development secured a “compulsory purchase order” of one section near the highest
portion of the Cliffs where a car park, toilets, and tearooms were built. In the 1970s,
when Shannon Development originally developed the site, independent local vendors
began to set up souvenir shops. Although buskers might have been playing music there
before that time, the new modest developments solidified the relationship between the
landscape and music at the Cliffs.
Discussions to develop more elaborate facilities began as early as the 1980s. This fol-
lowed a larger pattern across Ireland as the government began to actively promote tour-
ism development to stimulate a flagging economy (Healy and McDonagh, 2009: 383–84),
but as annual tourist numbers increased into the hundreds of thousands, legitimate con-
cerns were being raised at the Cliffs as well, including an increase in litter, rapid erosion
of the natural landscape, severe pressure on the modest public facilities, and a serious
threat to public safety. Signage and fencing were obviously not effective deterrents for
the public who felt compelled to cross (and even destroy) barriers so that they could
approach the cliff edge2 (Figure 1). During the initial planning stages, disagreements
between the Clare County Council and Shannon Development led the County Council to
Kaul 33
pursue the project on their own (Healy and McDonagh, 2009: 385–86). Subsequently, in
order to avoid a perception of conflict of interest with its own Planning Department, the
Council set up a subsidiary corporation called The Cliffs of Moher Center, Ltd, to move
forward with the development and eventual operation of the facilities.3 Despite the
attempt to create an independent entity, the local government authority and the subsidi-
ary corporation have always worked very closely with one another, and the general per-
ception is that the County Council more or less granted itself planning permission for the
project (Healy and McDonagh, 2009: 385–86), developed it, and now runs it. The final
result of the planning process was an extravagant interpretive center called The Cliffs of
Moher Experience that cost just under €32 million and was opened by the Irish Prime
Minister in 2007 with a great deal of fanfare. In many ways, the project has been a fan-
tastic success. Unfortunately though, the national economy began to falter and then
buckle completely almost immediately thereafter, leaving the Council with a massive bill
to pay in a crippled economy.
The new structure is an example par excellence of what Negra (2010) has labeled the
“new Irishness.” The impetus for the new center emerged out of the Celtic Tiger era of
the 1990s and early 2000s that was often celebrated, too soon it now seems, as “an eco-
nomic miracle.” Setting arguments about economic transformation aside, Negra (2010)
argues that the Celtic Tiger era also ushered in a new set of cultural and personal values
that displaced “sentimentality, pathos, nostalgia, volatility and vitality” (p. 839). “The
New Irishness,” she writes, “is more austere, more profit-minded, and more efficient
than pre-Celtic Tiger models of selfhood. It centralizes makeover strategies in which
both the self and the landscape are to be relentlessly improved upon and developed for
maximum efficiency” (Negra, 2010: 850). She also notes that part of this transformation
Figure 1. Signage and fencing at the Cliffs.
34 Tourist Studies 14(1)
was to replace the “traditional” representative symbols of Irishness (shamrocks, rain-
bows, and rural “folk”) with modern architectural aesthetics that symbolized Ireland’s
new identity as cosmopolitan and globalized (Negra, 2010: 839). The main building at
The Cliffs of Moher Experience exhibits exactly the kind of austere, hypermodern, fluid
architectural design that she describes. The building is set completely into the hillside
near the original car park with expanded trails and viewing platforms along the cliffs’
edge. Inside, there is a large gift shop,4 two restaurants, and a cavernous exhibit hall. It is
a truly impressive facility that has won many awards,5 and the developers proudly adver-
tise its low impact on the environment.
The facility may be the perfect symbol of this successful, wealthy, “New Irishness,”
but the planning process for the new development and its subsequent management have
also sparked numerous and ongoing controversies. Some point out that the County
Council pursued the most elaborate, most expensive plan on offer and is now heavily
indebted. In fact, only 2 years before its official opening, the project leaders had to revise
their cost estimates upward eightfold from the original projections (Deegan, 2005: 2).
Much of the local population in the area also resent the fact that they are now actively
discouraged from entering the site without paying the newly implemented parking fees.
They are even more resentful that a counter-proposal by Shannon Development was
rejected to build the main tourist infrastructure in local communities and implement
park-and-ride schemes to bus tourists to the Cliffs (Healy et al., 2012: 12–13). That pro-
posal would have brought tourists in more direct contact with local communities where
they would spend money in local restaurants and shops, and it would have had a much
more minimal environmental impact on the site itself (Healy and McDonagh, 2009:
386). Now, the complaint goes, the County Council has sequestered all of the tourist
trade within the new interpretive center instead of spreading the wealth around the
region. Several coach-tour operators temporarily boycotted the site too, when they were
told that they would be charged eight times as much in parking fees (Healy et al., 2012:
13). And then, there was the very public dispute between the developers and buskers.
One local told me,
On a weekly basis, I’m not kidding … almost week-by-week … it was a guaranteed [newspaper]
story, although to be honest, the local people were fed up with reading about it … It got to the
point if you talk to local people—if you just say “The Cliffs”—a lot of people will say, “Oh,
don’t talk to me about the Cliffs”!
To some extent, it could be argued that these points of conflict are the natural result of
a major new development in the region; however, it is also clear that the developers’
aggressive moves to rapidly take managerial and economic control of the site to the detri-
ment of local communities, and their attempt to exclude all other vendors and the musi-
cians, initiated an adversarial posture that demanded a total ownership and appropriation
of the Cliffs of Moher.
While “ownership” is commonly understood to be a fairly simple legal matter, in fact,
it is often far more complicated. “Ownership,” write Busse and Strang (2011), can be
perceived “as a set of processes through which people assert and contest rights rather
than a static bundle or structure of rights” (p. 4). Despite the fact that the County Council
Kaul 35
legally owns the site, there are several operational definitions of “ownership” in the pub-
lic discourse about the Cliffs of Moher. In Ireland, there is a long-standing tradition that
the public has access to the coastline, which was formalized into law under the 1993
Roads Act. Under the Act, the local authority, in this case the Clare County Council, is
required to protect such rights-of-way, but it also has the authority to extinguish them.
Having a right-of-way through the County Council’s property does not automatically
allow people to engage in commercial trading there though, whether it takes the form of
selling souvenirs or playing music for tips. The protection of this right-of-way by the
tourism authorities has been mixed. For example, on the one hand, the authorities recently
secured permission from the local landowners to develop a more secure walking path
along the whole 8-km length of the cliffs’ edge from Doolin in the north to Liscannor in
the south, complete with permanent fencing and pavements. This would effectively
instantiate the tradition of open-access into a physical structure. On the other hand, the
developers of the new center have made active attempts to limit access as well. Parking
along the road leading to the Cliffs has been banned, so visitors are no longer able to use
their right-of-way unless they hike uphill many kilometers to the main site. Instead, they
are now funneled into the center’s car park, which currently charges €6 per adult pas-
senger. Even though it might be argued that the parking charge is reasonable given that
it also effectively acts as an entrance fee to the site, it is often cited by locals as an indica-
tor that the site has been “taken over” and “ruined” by the County Council and the sub-
sidiary corporation, The Cliffs of Moher Ltd. Why should this be so? More is at work
here than an arguably modest increase in parking fees.
At least part of the public’s unease in this case is the seemingly porous administrative
(and conceptual) relationship between the governmental and private sectors, and the com-
plicated (and often confused) understanding of “ownership” of the site. As Bramwell
(2011) has argued, more attention needs to be paid to the relationship between the govern-
ance of tourism and sustainable development. Echoing Foucault’s (1997) notion of “gov-
ernmentality” (p. 300), Bramwell (2011) notes that “governance” does not simply include
state power, although the power of the state is typically the dominant force; instead, an
understanding of the governance of tourist sites must also include diverse economic stake-
holders, non-governmental organizations, and local communities who attempt to influ-
ence policy (p. 460). An analysis of the “governmentality” of tourist sites necessarily
includes an examination of “micro-scale agency, macro-scale structures and, most impor-
tantly, the dialectical relations between them” (Bramwell, 2011: 469). An important part
of what motivates people at the micro-scale is of course cultural rather than simply politi-
cal or economic. There is a widespread perception that the Cliffs of Moher is being turned
into what Edensor (2001) has called a “tourist enclave,” a space around which borders—
both figurative and literal—are erected. Visitors are shepherded into the enclave where
they are encouraged to spend money. For locals, the increasing regulation instituted by the
subsidiary corporation and the Clare County Council are figurative boundaries that they
perceive to be appropriating the bulk of the tourist trade such that the corporation reaps
most of the profits, and also unintentionally discourages the local populace from visiting
the site. If ownership is, as Busse and Strang (2011: 4) suggest, a process of asserting ones
rights, then it is clear that the County Council and its subsidiary corporation “own” the
Cliffs of Moher significantly more now than they used to.
36 Tourist Studies 14(1)
I would suggest that the issue with the increased charges at the car park along with
other actions taken by the developers have become emblematic of the larger concern
with the neoliberal privatization of public resources in general, too. As McKenna et al.
(2007) have pointed out in their analysis of management strategies of Irish “common-
age” resources in Donegal, Ireland,
[I]n rural areas major national and regional scale concerns (e.g., conservation of habitat) are
usually secondary to local issues (e.g., the need for a playing field) … Local people are
extremely sensitive about any action that could be construed as an attempt to claim individual
ownership of the jointly owned commonage. (p. 163)
While their case study was looking at a true “commons” area as opposed to a state-
owned landscape with a public right-of-way as in the case of the Cliffs of Moher, the
same public sensitivity holds true in both cases.
To return to my central thesis, the relationship between cultural values and commer-
cial development is fraught with tension. In other words, one way the public has concep-
tualized the growing conflicts at the Cliffs of Moher is that they are symptomatic of a
shift in the site’s categorization from a highly symbolic, publicly owned “commons” to
a privately owned and operated business; in other words, the simplified public discourse
contends that what was once a national resource is now a commodified tourist product.
The Cliffs are not in fact a commons, but in a broader sense, they are widely perceived
to be a national natural resource, owned by all. People are understandably uncomfortable
when a landscape so pregnant with cultural and national meaning is developed and pri-
vatized by macro-scale institutions that have garnered so much distrust due to the eco-
nomic crash in Ireland.
The Cliffs of Moher is more than just a destination for international tourists, or a
point of economic and political contention for locals. It is a quintessential Irish land-
scape, and in that sense, it is a highly charged symbolic space. Indeed, it is not over-
stating the case to claim that the Cliffs have become one of a collection of metonyms
for Irishness as a whole. Examples from popular culture that use the Cliffs of Moher to
represent Irish cultural and national identity are extensive. To cite just a few examples,
they are ubiquitously featured in tourist brochures and websites; Guinness, Irish Mist,
Cadbury Chocolate, and many other companies have used depictions of the Cliffs in
advertisements; there’s a famous image of Bono from U2 at the site; and Riverdance
recently did a huge dance production there as well.6 This last example in particular is
emblematic of how seemingly unrelated national and cultural symbols like landscapes,
dance, and traditional music intersect in the public consciousness. On their own, each
is a marker of Irish identity, but together, they form a zeitgeist, a metonym for Irishness.
In a discussion about how landscapes often evoke national ideologies, Edensor (2002)
writes,
It is difficult to mention a nation without conjuring up a particular rural landscape (often with
particular people carrying out certain actions). [For example,] Ireland has become synonymous
with its West Coast … These landscapes are selective shorthand for these nations, synecdoches
through which they are recognised globally. (pp. 39–40)
Kaul 37
In this sense, the Cliffs of Moher fit into the collective national consciousness in
Ireland, and are promoted as a visual representation of Irishness for international tourists.
To be sure, the Cliffs are not the only rural, West Coast symbol of Irish identity, but they
are indeed a powerful and prominent one. Edensor’s claim that nationalized rural land-
scapes are also commonly imbricated with nationalized cultural practices, in this case
with traditional Irish music, is also apropos. Tourist expectations contribute to this con-
flation of the landscape with Irish music as well. One busker at the site, a harpist, told
me,
I sing a lot of folk music, so lots of Irish ballads, you know, because that’s what tourists like to
hear. Personally, I like rock-and-roll, but you can’t really play that with a harp! Yeah, so, it goes
down better here—more traditional kind of stuff.
Later in the same interview, she told me,
People come here—they love the music. They love the atmosphere it creates … I think the
music makes it more Irish—makes it more County Clare. You know, because music is such a
big part of County Clare.
In an interview with another local musician in which I asked about the basic features
of the “west County Clare style” of fiddle playing, she described aspects of the local
landscape and failed to mention a single musicological technique. She explained that her
playing is the direct result of the gentle rolling pastureland in that part of the county, the
rough seas along the coast, and the soaring Cliffs of Moher. She also claimed that the
cave systems that undercut the parish gave her playing a “deep energy” (Kaul, 2011:
243).
This synthesis of Irishness, Irish music, and the landscape is nothing new, and it goes
well beyond this one locale. There has been a long-standing fetishization of the land in
Ireland, which has led to a romantic notion that Irish culture, traditions, and even kinship,
are derived directly from the land itself (Kaul, 2011: 241). As far back as the 1930s,
Conrad Arensberg (1959), who conducted ethnography for a short time near the Cliffs of
Moher, wrote, “A particular ancestral line is inseparable from a particular plot of earth.
All others are ‘strangers to the land’” (p. 83). So, describing the Cliffs of Moher not just
as an Irish landscape but also as a “musical landscape” has real resonance. For many
musicians, tourists, and local residents, there is a romantic and evocative union of land,
music, and identity at the Cliffs.
Making money, making music
Just as the relationship between commerce and culture has created tension at the Cliffs of
Moher, a similarly awkward relationship occurs at the nexus between money-making and
traditional Irish music-making in Irish pubs. As tourism developed into a major part of the
economy in the 1980s and 1990s in the West of Ireland, publicans who owned establish-
ments on the more heavily trafficked “tourist routes” began to pay musicians a set amount
at the end of the evening if they agreed to play sessions to draw tourists into the pub (Kaul,
38 Tourist Studies 14(1)
2007: 707–08; 2009: 116–17). It was a system that evolved slowly, institutionalizing an
older set of values in which musicians’ contributions to the social milieu were rewarded
with gifts of food, drink, and occasional monetary payments. Despite the more formal
monetary arrangements in place today, musicians maintain a significant degree of control
over their relationship with pub owners. Furthermore, tourists do not directly pay for
musicians’ services. In this way, the fee system sublimates the supposedly “polluting”
effects of tourism commerce and thereby helps maintain an aura of purity and authenticity
for both tourists and musicians. On the surface, it appears that musicians are spontane-
ously playing music for the fun of it, although behind the scenes, in the backstage areas
of the tourist–host relationship, things are more complex. Money generated from the tour-
ists passes through the pub, which is then turned into a kind of “gift” given to the musi-
cians at the end of the night (Kaul, 2007: 709–10). The point I want to make here is that
in the session context musicians have largely been able to strike a balance between mak-
ing money and maintaining a significant level of control over the production of their
music.
At the Cliffs, like in the session context in pubs, a system evolved slowly over time
between the musicians who played there. Buskers necessarily had to spread out over the
site so that the music would not sonically overlap. Out of this necessity evolved an infor-
mal number of regular spots, called “pitches,” where musicians would stake out a musi-
cal territory. A hierarchy developed based on seniority and how regularly one played
there. Musicians who depended on busking at the Cliffs, and/or had been playing there
for 20 years or more, garnered higher status among the buskers and were therefore paid
due deference because of their achieved status. Buskers new to the site had to learn these
informal rules. One musician I know who started busking there in the early 2000s told
me about how he was inculcated into this system:
I didn’t know anyone at the time or whatever, but one day there was a [good spot] … And one
morning I came in, and there was no one there. So, I didn’t know the politics—the rules—or
whatever. So I just put myself there and played for an hour before someone else sat like ten or
fifteen meters away from me and started playing the accordion. And then I went to see him and
said “that’s not cool, you could put yourself a bit further from me.” And he said, “Yeah, fuck
off, you! That’s my spot, I mean, I’ve been playing here for the last twenty-five years” … So
then it kind of kicked in that it was—OK, there are spots around … [for] “regulars” … Well,
fair enough. If a man is here twenty years, it’s his spot. And everyone knows it and you come
in there, you don’t know what’s going on. You have to learn that stuff. So, I never took his spot
again, or if he was there in the morning, I’d probably play for awhile checking out if he would
come, and as soon as he comes, like—whiff!—I go away.
The new licensing scheme formalized what was an egalitarian relationship between
musicians based on achieved status. Now, there are five official pitches where musicians
can play, all marked with a numbered sign (Figures 2 and 3), and only 10 musicians may
obtain a license to reserve one of them at any given time. Seniority still plays a role. A
harpist who has been playing at the Cliffs for several decades told me that “it’s kind of
an understanding between us four or five that are here on a regular basis that we kind of
stake out our own pitches.” Buskers prioritize some pitches over others because some are
Kaul 39
Figure 3. A musician playing a harp at the Cliffs.
Figure 2. Area with a numbered sign, one of the official pitches, where musicians can play.
40 Tourist Studies 14(1)
clearly more lucrative. A newer busker at the site described how the informal system of
seniority calcified into a more formal arrangement:
When I came along in 2006, we all got the licenses together, but obviously recognized the fact
that these people were already there, and that’s fine … three of the pitches were pretty much
claimed, if you like, from day one.
Many buskers only play for a morning or an afternoon, so some pitches are shared
among several musicians. All of these arrangements about who gets what pitch are
worked out among the musicians themselves.
Interestingly, unlike the session context in which the commercial exchanges are
hidden from view, busking collapses the act of music-making and money-making. In
fact, the commercial exchange between the musician and passersby is a central charac-
teristic of the collective performance. Buskers put out a hat, a basket, or a music case
into which tourists deposit Euros. The commercial relationship is there for anyone to
see, but this too is seen as an exchange of gifts since no fee or payment is required and
because it is clear that musicians are in complete control of the arrangement. For musi-
cians, it is a far riskier enterprise than the pub sessions because unlike playing a weekly
gig in a pub that guarantees payment, busking cannot compel anyone to offer up a
monetary gift in exchange for music. Some days can be awful, and other days are quite
lucrative. One musician I have known for a decade made most of his income for sev-
eral years by busking at the Cliffs before he was asked to play a few weekly pub ses-
sions. He told me that the flow of money while busking is quite variable due to the
seasonality of tourism:
Well, in the wintertime you can stay there three hours to make fifteen quid, but in the
summertime you can stay ten minutes and make fifteen quid quickly.
But he also explained how unpredictable it can be by comparing a “bad day” to a
“good day” busking at the Cliffs:
The smallest [amount I made] was probably €3 after two hours. I kept hoping that something
good would come, but after two hours I still only had €3.50 or something like that in the basket.
So I thought, “I just better stay home today. There’s no need to push myself too much because
nothing’s going to come today,” you know?
And [another] day, I made 70 quid. I was just putting my stool there and sat on it. I opened my
bag, took out the basket, took off my flute case and my whistles and all, and I’ve already got
money falling in the basket! I was just taking my flute out of the bag, you know, and this money
is coming in like €2 and you’re like, “I haven’t started playing yet!” And already after a couple
of minutes, you’ve got a fiver in there [and] you’re just putting your flute together!
All of the buskers at the Cliffs who I interviewed talked at length about the difficulty
of playing outdoors in a landscape with strong winds, and salty sea air that quickly cor-
rodes their instruments. Some musicians have had instruments custom-made for rigorous
outdoor environments. Others have had to regularly buy new ones. Even in sunny
weather in Ireland, the temperatures are often frigid. Cold fingers and hands make for
Kaul 41
difficult playing. Another musician who plays at the site also said that tourists often dras-
tically overestimate how much buskers make in a day:
I declare every cent to my accountant, and I’ll tell you, when I took my stuff to my accountant
to have the annual books done the last time, he looked at the figures and he said, “I can’t believe
how little you make.” [He burst into laughter.] Just to squash any rumors!
However, according to the buskers, tourists are increasingly confused about their
relationship to the corporation that runs the site, wrongly assuming that the musicians
are paid employees. “We’re not employed,” one of the buskers emphatically pointed
out to me. “You know, a lot of people think we are, but we’re not.” As a result of this
confusion though, musicians told me that tips have declined dramatically since the
opening of the new center. “It’s not easy to make money up here,” one of the buskers
told me, “and it’s not as easy to make money as it was [before the new licensing
system].”
More importantly, unlike the pub session context, buskers’ activities at the Cliffs are
now heavily regulated and controlled. The contract that musicians are now required to
sign mostly limits what musicians cannot do. One of the primary concerns for musicians
is that they are not allowed to sell their own CDs directly to the public. Instead, they must
now sell them in the official gift shop, but since tourists typically purchase a CD impul-
sively on the spot, musicians report a drastic decline in sales. What’s more, the manage-
ment takes a significant cut now, about one-third of the total price, from the CD sales for
the value added tax (VAT) and for something they are calling a “handling charge.” There
are also a number of rather absurd rules in the contract, including a restriction against
consuming “significant amounts” of food or drink. The contract does not make musi-
cians employees of the center, and it certainly offers them no remuneration for their
services. So, not only has the management attempted to take almost absolute control over
the activities of buskers at the Cliffs (including whether one eats or drinks), they have
also negatively impacted their income. To say the least, musicians are not satisfied with
their new contract, and in fact, a number of musicians have simply abandoned the site
altogether rather than submit to it.
I would argue that, unlike the session context in which musicians have been able to
remain independent while simultaneously increasing their income, this is a classic case
of touristic commodification. Moreover, it is a clear example of what Foucault (1984)
calls “bio-power” (pp. 262–63) or “governmentality,” which might simply be defined
as the increasing control that governing bodies have over individuals’ lives. Foucault
argues that “governmentality” is at the heart of the capitalist project, and is therefore a
useful framework for the analysis of tourism developments. Often, this concept is
understood to constitute a wide range of institutional power structures from state gov-
ernment to private enterprises. Foucault (1997) goes further, though, and describes
governmentality as “the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and
instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with
each other” (p. 300). Of course, Foucault is interested not only in the processes by
which raw power is used to discipline individuals but also the processes in which dis-
ciplining becomes internalized; raw force transforms into self-policing. Despite the
fact that buskers now subject themselves to the regulatory control of the new licensing
42 Tourist Studies 14(1)
scheme, this internalization of governmentality has not yet fully taken place, and so the
tension remains.
“Busk Off If You’re Rubbish”
One other aspect of all of this that interests me is the partial disconnect between the
overly inflammatory public discourse about the conflict and the actual grievances of the
musicians at the site. The conflicts are very real, but the narrative that quickly took hold
in the press during the months before the new center’s opening was by all accounts
blown out of proportion. The shrillness of the debate seems symptomatic of the identity
crisis caused by a rapid culture change wrought by the Celtic Tiger era, and in the wake
of the more recent economic crash, anxieties about what it means to be Irish in the mod-
ern world seem even more pressing.
Some of the claims made on both sides of the debate at the Cliffs were hyperbolic,
misleading, and personal. For example, one of the project leaders at the Clare County
Council in charge of developing the new center claimed in several news stories that “one
[busker] had a dog that attacked passing tourists” (Hogan, 2007: 11). In one inflammatory
news article in England’s tabloid The Sun, the same official disparages the buskers’ musi-
cianship in addition to repeating the biting dog story: “It had become an easy way to make
money—you go up there with a tin whistle and whether you can play or not, probably
some people will throw you some money in hopes you might stop playing” (“Busk Off If
You’re Rubbish,” 2007). One of the other administrators at the site told me in an interview
that music can interfere with the reproductive cycles of the puffins that come to breed
every summer at the Cliffs. Given the overwhelming sounds of howling winds and pound-
ing surf, not to mention the noise and activity generated from hundreds or thousands of
tourists per day, this claim seems rather far-fetched. Still, this administrator told me,
The decibel level that [musicians] can generate is too high in the bird-nesting season. There are
certain noise restrictions because it’s a protected area for sea birds, and the bird nesting season
which starts in the beginning of April continues right through the summer, and that decibel
restriction is there to avoid negatively impacting the sea bird species. Now, all of the, sort of—
you know—the Celtic harp, the banjo, the tin whistle, the concert flute, the fiddle, the guitar,
most of them are played unamplified. Or, anything that is played amplified, it’s a very low level
of amplification. But again—you know—you’d see guys setting up there with their—sort of—
bass guitar and blasting out AC/DC.
Another high-level employee at the interpretive center told me that it was the musi-
cians themselves who wanted the regulations and the contract in the first place. This was
flatly denied by all of the musicians I interviewed. On the other side of the debate, con-
spiratorial rumors circulated that the county officials were submitting the musicians’
names to the Irish Tax & Customs Department because they assumed musicians weren’t
paying taxes on their earnings. And as mentioned earlier, a now-famous open letter
expressing concern about the future of the buskers at the Cliffs was signed by 43 famous
Irish musicians like Christy Moore, Mary Black, Donal Lunny, Martin Hayes, and others
Kaul 43
(Kelly, 2006: 10). One of the buskers I interviewed was very grateful for the public sup-
port, but he was also quite equivocating about its impact:
Once that [letter] happened, then that got in the public media, but again it was taken out of
context and exaggerated. And it was like, “We’ve now got a national movement!” … as though
saying it was a human rights issue. And this petition became legendary. In fact, when I
eventually tracked it down I was so disappointed … It was like a polite letter … That’s the
irony, which often happens I suppose with situations of conflict, is that the real conflict is
actually underground or hidden.
Despite all of this public attention, even the musicians who busk at the Cliffs feel that
the whole issue has been spun out of control. In fact, musicians feel that the simplistic
“David and Goliath” narrative pitting them against the tourism developers misses some
very real problems that are more mundane. Most musicians at the Cliffs do not mind the
fact that some new regulations have been put into place or that they need to obtain a
license; in fact, it is beneficial to be one of the official buskers at the site because it
reduces the informal competition that took place before. One musician even told me that
he didn’t mind the suggestion that musicians would have to audition before being granted
a contract. He said,
This is the biggest misinformation, that we were—you know—insulted … We were told we
objected to it. Not a single busker objected to it … On the contrary, we said “Fine. We are
confident. We are musicians. We could play for hours … We don’t have a problem with that,”
but the media made a big thing about it … Other people were offended on our behalf.
Indeed, the conflict made for good headlines like these that reduced the complexities
of the story down into an easily digested narrative: “Buskers Banned” (The Birmingham
Evening Mail, 2007) “Battle for the Buskers” (The News of the World, 2006), “Buskers
Face the Music” (Kelly, 2006: 10), “No Moher Buskers” (Deegan, 2007b: 23), and of
course “Busk Off If You’re Rubbish” (The Sun, 2007).
There seem to be at least two significant but slightly different understandings at work
about the appropriate relationship between music-making and money-making in this
situation. While some of the more hostile actions taken against musicians at the Cliffs of
Moher were obviously aggressive and adversarial, clearly more is going on here for the
general public than the livelihoods of a small handful of musicians. For buskers at the
Cliffs, very practical concerns about their contractual relationship with the Interpretive
Center are at the heart of the matter. They are trying to make a living by playing music,
so their concern is at least in part about how to intensify the commercialization of the
music for individual profits, while for the public, it seems to me that there is a broader
concern with commercializing and regulating the site and musicians’ activities there at
all. What is at work here in the demonization of the tourism authorities, and the valoriza-
tion of the musicians is at least in part the new Celtic Tiger version of Irishness colliding
headlong into older narratives of Irishness. Bringing this to the fore even more is the fact
that all of this is occurring in a new post-Celtic Tiger era. It should come as no surprise
that this kind of confusion resulting from rapid social and economic change causes a
crisis of identity.
44 Tourist Studies 14(1)
Conclusion
What then is the proper balance between music-making and money-making at tourist
sites? The debates about “authenticity” and touristic commodification have been prob-
lematized in the literature for the reason that these notions are problematic (to cite just
a few: Bruner, 2005; Cohen, 1988; Connell and Gibson, 2003; Greenwood, 1989 [1977];
MacCannell, 1989 [1976], 1992; Smith, 1989 [1977]; Trilling, 1972; Wang, 2000), but
they resurface time and again for the very reason that they are key issues for the people
we study. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Kaul, 2007), an increase in commercial
exchanges (i.e. “commercialization”) in relation to the production of an art-form in-
and-of-itself is not necessarily the problem. It is beneficial to the artists, and even neces-
sary for their survival. The comparison with pub sessions is a case in point. On the other
hand, I have argued that commodification in its pure form occurs (and “authenticity” is
eroded) when artists lose control over their art-form’s production, regardless of the
proximal relationship of commercial exchange to the production of the art-form, the
method of the transaction, or its intensity. In other words, commercialization can occur
without the loss of control that creates commodification. This is an important distinc-
tion to make if we truly wish to advocate for the livelihoods of musicians who have
been able to commercialize their musical practice for their own benefit while maintain-
ing a high degree of control and a sense of “authenticity.” Buskers at the Cliffs of Moher
are very interested in commercializing their activities further (e.g. by increasing their
profits from the sale of CDs) precisely because it makes up part, or all, of their liveli-
hood. What is worrisome is that the new relationship between the tourism authorities
and the musicians has nothing to do with commercialization itself, but instead, the
appropriation of the production of the music and a reduction in the benefits of the com-
mercial exchange for the musicians. To put a finer point on it, the internal debate at the
Cliffs is not about whether to commercialize the music, but instead how to do so and
who benefits.
Symbolic sites of national identity are “usually claimed by competing groups, who
invest them with meanings which are attuned to their political project or identity”
(Edensor, 2002: 46). Given their multivocality, these landscapes often become what Pile
has called “geographies of resistance” (Pile, 1997: 2). Moreover, nationalized cultural
spaces and nationalized cultural practices are difficult to disentangle, as the developers
of the new interpretive center at the Cliffs of Moher discovered. The Cliffs have come
to be conceptualized as a musical landscape, and the attempt to separate the music from
the place was probably always doomed to failure. Although perhaps unintentional, I
find it striking that in the administrator’s remarks about the decibel levels of various
instruments, quoted earlier, makes a clear distinction between traditional Irish music,
which is deemed acceptable and in harmony with the natural landscape, and other gen-
res like rock-and-roll that are not. Perhaps ironically, one result of the conflict over the
new regulations has been to “purify” a sense of Irishness at the Cliffs of Moher, consoli-
dating the notion that the Irish musical tradition is part and parcel of this Irish land-
scape. Moreover, the new licensing scheme is seen as a way for the tourism authorities
to seize almost complete control over the music, including what genres of music are
acceptable and whether or not they eat or drink. The new licensing scheme should not
Kaul 45
be seen as a capitulation to public pressure and an effort to fully cooperate with buskers
at the site; rather, it seems to me that the tourism authorities have in fact appropriated
the processes of musical production and consumption for their own purposes, dramati-
cally reducing the amount of control musicians have over their art-form to the bare
minimum. As a result, instead of an inclusive, multivocal, sonically cacophonous musi-
cal landscape, the tourism authorities have made every effort to create a site that speaks
with their singular voice, what Bruner and Gorfain (1984) have called “monologic cer-
titude.” And what was once a landscape imbued with a multitude of meanings, a “pal-
impsest” in Barbara Bender’s (1998) sense of the term (p. 6), is now a landscape with
one authoritative interpretation.
Thinking even more broadly about this moment in Irish history, the crisis at the Cliffs
of Moher is a reflection of a larger identity crisis. “The Irish countryside,” writes Adrian
Peace (2005), “has become in effect a perennial site of struggle” (p. 496), and I agree
with Peace that the contestation over the Irish landscape in recent decades is not simply
an economic or political struggle, but a cultural one as well. In the wake of a massive
economic collapse in 2008 that was largely caused by overdevelopment, overemphasis
on privatization, and general greed, the heavy-handed actions of the Clare County
Council against a small group of traditional musicians set off a firestorm because there
is a sense that commonly held identity markers like the Cliffs of Moher and traditional
music have been transformed into profitable tourism products. As Fintan O’Toole
(2007) wrote, “The Cliffs of Moher have now become The Cliffs of Moher Experience”
(p. 16), implying that all meaning has been drained out of the place. If Negra is correct
that the Celtic Tiger reconfigured not only the Irish economy, but also Irish identity,
then a more fundamental question remains about what it means to be Irish in the post-
Celtic Tiger era.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to those who provided assistance at various stages in the development of this article:
Sal Buckler, Trish Winter, Philip Long, Robert Fry, and Becca Rice; my student research assistants
Moselle Singh, Kai Yin Ho, and Sarah Berndt; and all of the organizers of the Soundtracks
Conference held in Liverpool in July of 2012. Thanks as always to the people of northwest County
Clare, Ireland.
Funding
This research was generously supported by a Presidential Research Award from Augustana
College.
Notes
1. One notable exception is the work that has been done on performers at Washington Square
Park in New York City. See, for example, Prato (1984) and Harrison-Pepper (1990).
2. In fact, despite concerted efforts, this is still a problem.
3. This was done in large part because of a previous tourism development at another local site
called Mullaghmore that pitted the County Council against local activists for a full decade. The
conflict eventually wound up in the Supreme Court of Ireland, which ruled that governmental
46 Tourist Studies 14(1)
bodies must submit to the same planning processes as private developers (Peace, 2005: 508).
4. Interestingly, while the design of the building itself makes a strong modernist statement,
the gift shop is filled with the standard tourist souvenirs that one might find in any tourist-
oriented shop in the region, including many products that make strong references to the tropes
of “old Ireland”: recordings of traditional Irish music, Aran Island sweaters, stuffed-animal
sheep, family crests, and the like.
5. Awards include the “Excellence in Interpretation” from The Association of Heritage
Interpretation, 2007; “Best Public Interior” from the International Federation of Interior
Architects; “Best Irish Visitor Attraction” from the Irish Consumer Travel Awards, 2009; and
“Best Innovation Award” and “Green Technology Award” from the Planning Department of
the Clare County Council, 2011.
6. They’ve been featured in several movies including the film The Princess Bride as “the
Cliffs of Insanity,” and in scenes from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The site
was also recently nominated for (but did not win) a spot on the new list of the Seven
Wonders of the Natural World, and the directors of the site have been pushing to get World
Heritage Site status from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO).
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Author biography
Adam Kaul is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Augustana College. He is the author of
the book Turning the Tune (Berghahn Books, 2009) and several articles and book chapters about
traditional music, tourism, and the economics of musical performance in the West of Ireland.
